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CNET's review of the Dish Hopper DVR

An award celebrating the best of tech fell victim to legal wrangling Thursday. CNET has dropped Dish Network's new DVR product from its CES awards consideration, citing a lawsuit from its parent company CBS against Dish.

CNET previously named Dish Network's Hopper with Sling DVR as a finalist for this year's "Best of CES" awards. But CBS, which owns CNET, along with other networks are suing Dish in California over the product.

The Hopper, launched last year with the help of some real live kangaroos, has a feature that records TV and automatically skips commercials for primetime on networks ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC. It also includes a feature that enables television recordings to be transferred over WiFi to an iPad for later viewing. The networks surely want to keep this type of viewing for sale on sites such as Hulu and elsewhere.

Before removing the Hopper from its awards, CNET itself had published a review on January 7 praising the new version of the Hopper which was released at CES, calling it "cutting edge stuff" that "almost has it all."

On the bottom of its "Best of CES" page of finalists, CNET now has the following statement, explaining the Hopper's removal from the awards: "The Dish Hopper with Sling was removed from consideration due to active litigation involving our parent company CBS Corp. We will no longer be reviewing products manufactured by companies with which we are in litigation with respect to such product."

Dish CEO Joe Clayton said in a statement: “We are saddened that CNET’s staff is being denied its editorial independence because of CBS’ heavy-handed tactics. This action has nothing to do with the merits of our new product. Hopper with Sling is all about consumer choice and control over the TV experience. That CBS, which owns CNET.com, would censor that message is insulting to consumers."